Tuesday, 4 August 2015

Cockabilly 28 July 2015 DJ Set List

Drag a comb through your quiff, swallow a fistful of bop
pills and rock around the cock – at COCKABILLY!

COCKABILLY returns to the louche surroundings of The George
& Dragon in Shoreditch on Tuesday 28 July 2015! Leather boys, gay greasers,
cry-babies, prison wives and juvenile delinquents of all ages are welcome at
Cockabilly - London’s only regular queer rockabilly night! With DJ Mal Nicholson and I
spinning all your favourite rancid vintage sleaze classicks! Think rockabilly,
rhythm and blues, surf, punk and tittyshakers!

The George & Dragon: 2-4 Hackney Road London E2 7NS

8-midnight

FREE

In his definitive literary statement, 1981’s Shock Value: A
Tasteful Book about Bad Taste (which I revere as a sacred text), cult cinema’s Pope
of Trash John Waters describes his early film Mondo Trasho (1969) as “a gutter
film. “ (“It was filmed in alleys, gutters, Laundromats and deserted areas
around Baltimore…”).

/ Embryonic young starlet Divine in her first starring role in Mondo Trasho (1969) /In a similar vein, when I DJ at either
Cockabilly or my own punkabilly booze party club night Lobotomy Room I endeavour to exhume and play the most rancid “gutter
music” possible. Hopefully in my hour-long set at the July
2015 Cockabilly I succeeded.

As a friend of mine present
pointed out (not entirely approvingly, I suspect!) “Your set got quite Country
in the middle!” I've indeed recently re-visited and incorporated some old-school
Country and Western tracks that I vividly remember from my seventies rural Quebec
childhood. A particular strain of white trash / trailer park hillbilly Country
music – the kind that conjures images of women with teased hair and frosted
lipstick (think Karen Black as Rayette in Five Easy Pieces) lamenting about
adultery, men with werewolf sideburns and big cowboy belt buckles crying into
their beers at neon-lit honky tonks – is part of my musical DNA. I definitely
recall my mother singing along to Loretta Lynn’s tough-talking 1968 single “Fist City”, in
which the earthy no-nonsense coalminers daughter threatens some tramp to steer clear of her man. “If you don’t want to
go to Fist City / You’d better detour around my town / ‘Cause I’ll grab you by
the hair of the head and I’ll lift you offa the ground!” Lynn warns her
would-be rival.

/ There's an even better clip of Tammy Wynette belting out "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad" (sporting a beehive wig, sequinned mini-dress and go-go boots) on Youtube, but whoever posted it disabled embedding, damn it! So watch it here instead /“Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go
Bad”, meanwhile, is the title track of the 1967 début album of Lynn’s contemporary
Tammy Wynette. In a variation of the Kitty Wells Country & Western standard
“It Wasn't Go Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”, the bouffant-haired First Lady of
Country casts herself as a virtuous Christian housewife who’s “never seen the
inside of a barroom / Or listened to a jukebox all night long” vowing to become
a hardened bar stool mama if it wins back her straying husband. “I'll even
learn to like the taste of whiskey,” Wynette wails over rousing quasi-rocabilly
guitar twangs (there's a sob trapped in her voice, even on a defiant and sassy number like this). “In fact, you'll hardly recognize your wife / I'll buy some brand new
clothes and dress up fancy /For my journey to the wilder side of life.”

A nice appreciation of the irresistibly kitsch vintage homoerotic art of illustrator George Quaintance (1902-1957) cropped up on the Dangerous Minds blog today. Read it here. Quaintance is definitely a precursor of Tom of Finland and would appear to be an influence on the campy queer vision of French artists Pierre et Gilles. One of the most popular pics I’ve ever posted on tumblr is Quaintance’s painting “Shore Leave.”

I'm next guest DJ'ing on Sunday 16 August 2015 at the free all-day Elvis-o-Rama tribute event A Date with Elvis in Shoreditch. See the Facebook events page for details. If you're London-based, why not come and wriggle and cavort like Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas?

And finally: my next putrid punkabilly booze party Lobotomy Room club night in the basement Bamboo Lounge of Fontaine's is Friday 28 August 2015! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock'n'roll at Lobotomy Room! In the meantime, read about the June 2015 one here.